The 7 Health Habits of Highly Effective Dads

1. Stair climbing

Because I worked in the office, the most obvious exercise I could do was taking the stairs. This habit has been the easiest one to implement. Once I decided and wrote in my notebook that I no longer take the elevator, I became a stair-climber.

When colleagues would take the elevator and invite me for lunch, I kindly reminded them that I was the staircase guy. It has been fun and worked well.

I’ve been elevator-free for almost a decade now.

The easiest way to implement a new habit is in a new environment. If you have a new job, workspace, or commuting routine, you can build this habit easily. Just do it repeatedly for 30-60-90 days, and you’re good.

If you can’t make it to a new routine easily, just write it down and remind yourself in different ways. If you keep forgetting, come up with an easier and downscaled version of your habit.

2. Walking

The health benefits of regular walking are numerous. For example, you can use your daily walking habit as means of ironing out your blood sugar spikes.

The added benefit of your daily walks is that you’ll spend time in nature, plus you’ll find time to come up with great ideas.

Walking is by far my favorite health habit. I enjoy my daily walks to the best and always come back with a fresh mind and often with useful ideas and insights.

To me, walking is a non-negotiable. I never skip my daily walks. I treat them as one would treat their coffee. (Plus I like it as one would like a coffee break.)

I picked up walking as a daily habit in the office. I started with 10 minutes in the nearby park and now I’m spending some 40-45 minutes walking as my lunch break. Indeed, I replaced my lunch break with a walking break.

READ

The One Surprising Tip That Will Make You a Walkaholic

3. Exercise snacks and VILPA

If you can’t maintain a structured exercise regime or don’t have time to exercise, you no longer have an excuse. Exercise snacks are isolated ≤1-min bouts of vigorous exercise performed periodically throughout the day with zero equipment.

Vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity (VILPA) is a very similar term to exercise snacks. The only major difference is that VILPA is performed as a daily living activity (like gardening or carrying grocery bags) while exercise snacks are performed as exercises.

Studies show that VILPA is associated with reduced all-cause, cardiovascular, and cancer mortality as well as reduced incidence of major adverse cardiovascular events and cancer. Exercise snacks have similar benefits, though we have limited studies and mixed evidence.

My daily exercise snacks are:

3x climbing 3 floors with max speed
3x wall sit for 1 minute
3x plank for 1 minute
3x jumping jacks for 1 minute
3x jumping rope for 1 minute
Carrying big shopping bags upstairs (VILPA) (A strong reason why you shouldn’t order groceries to your house.)

I alter those snacks between days. I do the stair climbing in the office and the others when I work from home.

The beauty of exercise snacks is that they literally take 3×1 minutes a day while offering evidence-based health benefits. They are also a fun way to incorporate vigorous exercise into your daily routine.

4. Meditation (sorry, guys)

Meditation has always been the black sheep for me. All successful people incorporated meditation into their morning routines. I know, I know…

I have meditated on my own as well as with the Headspace app multiple times in my life.

Still, I couldn’t notice the benefits… and quit multiple times.

The moment, however, when I began to see the real health benefits of meditation was when I began to experience insomnia. Coupled with a mild panic disorder, there was a perfect time to immerse myself in the scientific literature and visit a sleep doctor.

She advised that I should pick up meditation to improve my sleep. (She told me that there is no other cure or medication to combat my sleep problem.) And she admitted that meditation has been a major thing for her.

From that moment, I treat meditation as a life-saving, scientifically proven method, prescribed by my doctor that helps avoid the worst nights of my life.

I only meditate 3 times a week in the morning. I now have a rock-solid physical routine for this: after I prepare my meal for the day, I immediately put on my headphones and start to meditate for 10 minutes.

Obviously, not these 10 minutes but my overall health habits including my meditation habit elevated me from my sleep disorder.

5. Physiotherapy/yoga/stretching

Who the hell wants to do yoga or physiotherapy? Not me.

Until I was diagnosed with CLBP (Chronic Low Back Pain).

Chances are sooner or later you’ll also develop CLBP as it has a lifetime prevalence of more than 80%.

After Christmas in 2022, I found myself laying in bed for days in unbearable back pain. I wasn’t able to go out for a pee alone, nor could I put on my socks. At the age of 40.

I cried from pain and powerlessness in front of my wife and daughter. Since then, my daughter would bring up this situation from time to time as the first time when she saw daddy crying like a toddler. (In fact, daddy had the motility of a toddler).

After visiting doctors and reading the scientific literature, I found a great physiotherapist, who introduced me to rehabilitating physiotherapy. It took me half a year until I defeated some 80% of my pain.

I learned that physiotherapy and yoga are the best (and probably the only) cures for low-back pain and they can even revert the process.

Since then, I introduced short, 10-minute physiotherapy sessions into my daily routine. I no longer do sessions every day, rather complement my other exercises and health habits with stabilizing and stretching exercises.

Do yoga, stretching, or some type of physiotherapy exercises, particularly if you’re sedentary. It will save your butt. Literally.

6. Zone 2 cardio

In his book, Outlive, Peter Attila recommends 4x 45 minutes (3 hours) of zone 2 training. (Zone 2 cardio training refers to an intensity when you can maintain a conversation).

My favorite cardio exercise is biking. I always loved biking and it can incorporate mild as well as vigorous or even HIIT protocols into your daily routine.

I carved out a single 1.5-hour bike session from my calendar.

The key here is that you do it the same day and time every week. This way, you can put it on your calendar as a recurring event. I managed to implement my biking sessions without stealing useful hours from my family: I would bike when my child was having her afternoon nap or when she was in kindergarten.

Pro tip: Do brisk walking while pushing the stroller.

As for such time-consuming habits, you’ll find the ideal week exercise helpful. I’ve known this method for many years but didn’t give serious attention to it until recently.

After watching Ali Abdaal’s video, I set out an hour to hammer out my ideal (ordinary) week. (It’s important that you plan out an ordinary week.) It helped me identify not the empty blocks, but rather the patterns I use my time across different life domains.

I used different colors for all those activities to see how much time I would allocate for any of them. It dawned on me that I’m probably a great dad who allocates lots of time for his family, and way less time for exercise and himself. The ideal week concept helped me to expand my horizons.

I also realized that I can enjoy an ideal day already and don’t need to wait until it happens in the future. (Maybe it never will.)

With the help of the ideal week exercise, I could also find mutual time with my family for exercise and moving our bodies. I re-read my ideal week during my weekly review every week.

7. Strength training/calisthenics

This one has been the toughest to implement. I needed 7 months (and a couple of protein bars) until I got this habit cemented.

The key, again, has been my daughter. I realized that I could cement this habit when we enjoy it as a family.

Either, I would pump iron in the evening while watching Peppa Pig together, or —even better—do some calisthenics in the nearby park while seeing my daughter hanging from bars or playing next to me. It only takes 15-20 minutes and I always feel better (and invincible) after my workouts.

The biggest barrier to my calisthenics journey has been my strength (or the lack of it). My grip strength sucks. I can’t do a proper pull-up or push-up.

However, I’ve found a proper by-pass…

There’re pleasing exercises you can do if you are fat and weak like me (sorry). I googled calisthenics basics and immediately found a great resource with beginner-friendly workout programs and even an app.

Case solved.

This is the time to implement one of those habits into your daily routine. Ready?

How to build up your health habits?

The No. 1 thing people mess things up with habits is that they try to build more than one habit at a time. As Wendy Wood in her book, Good Habits, Bad Habits points out, a habit is established when you no longer need the reward to make it happen. It’s not set in stone that it takes 30, 60, or 90 days to build a habit.

In my habit journey, I mostly focused on one habit at a time. The problem was, however, that despite tracking my progress I didn’t focus enough on my target habit.

For the sake of convenience, focus on monthly habits. Of course, some habits take way more time to implement (see my strength training habit), but we see the world through the lens of months and 30 days is a large enough window for making a change.

But here comes the key…

It’s not enough that you focus on your target habit throughout the month. You need to consciously shift your attention to this habit:

If you consume YouTube videos, watch content relating to your target habit.
If you read books, read a book about your target habit.
If you have friends, have a conversation about your target habit.
If you have a calendar, put this habit there.
Take a photo of your habit and hang it on the wall, fridge, or computer screen.

Pro tip: If you’re a Notion geek like me, you can put this photo into your Notion habit tracker.

Create a single note in your notebook (better yet, Notion) and start to craft ideas on how to implement and cement your target habit of the month.

I have a dedicated Notion database where I list all of my habits:

I list the habits I want to implement (and those already implemented).
I allocate a month for each habit.
I have multiple properties describing how I can build my habit.
I keep all related notes under each habit page in my Notion database.

Let’s discuss what you need to know about habit formation.

What science tells us about habit formation

The science of habit formation could easily fill a book (there are a couple of good books out there). I just want to make a few points to jump-start your habit journey.

Since the classic book of Charles Duhigg, we all know that the habit loop consists of three parts: (1) cue, (2) routine, and (3) reward. If you want to build up a habit, you need to manipulate and dissect this system.

We can do this by experimenting with either the cue or the reward. I find it way easier to play with the cue.

The cue is the trigger that initiates the habit. It can be:

Specific space (Where?)
Specific time (When?)
Specific people (With whom?)
Immediately preceding action or habit (What?)
Emotional state (What the hell?)

The easiest cues for me have been time and preceding habits.

To help you implement a habit and digest the habit loop theory, James Clear’s habit formulas come in handy:

I will [BEHAVIOR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION].
After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT].

This is a simple framework for building up your habits. Just find your cue (time, location, previous habit, etc.) to jumpstart your routine.

According to Katy Milkman, author of How to Change, there’re six scientific strategies to create habits:

Fresh start: Timing matters; new situations, new locations, and certain dates help to establish new habits. (You can learn more about the importance of fresh starts in Daniel H Pink’s book, When.)
Temptation building: Allow yourself a guilty pleasure only after you’ve finished with your new habit.
Commitment device: Reduce your own freedom with accountability or by pure mechanics.
Cue: Find an extraordinary cue (e.g. a toy alien).
Flexibility: Do it anyway, but not on certain days necessarily. (Paradox as it sounds, but it worked for me.)
Habit tracking: See later in this post.

I like this framework because it allows freedom. For example, if you want to implement a strength training habit, you could start on the first day of the month (1); do your training in tandem with a guilty pleasure like watching TV (2); prepare your gym clothes the day before (3); find a strong cue (4); work out on certain days not specified strictly (5); and track your habits (6).

Speaking of habit tracking, I want to share my honest thoughts on that.

A word about habit tracking

James Clear advises in his book, Atomic Habits, that you should track your habits to strengthen the habit loop.

I found it useful to track my progress: not for the analytical insights it provides, but rather for gamifying the process and strengthening the habit loop.

I only track a habit until it’s a rock-solid routine.

After experimenting with lots of habit-tracking options and tools, I always come back to Notion and Google Sheets. They’re readily available on all platforms, sync to the cloud, work well, and are fully customizable.

Don’t overthink it. Just use a single sheet or Notion table with checkboxes to track your progress over time.

How to hold yourself accountable?

If you find an accountability buddy, great! Do that. If you don’t, you could make great use of a personal document, called General Operating Principles (GOP), a term I borrowed from Sam Carpenter’s book, The Systems Mindset.

GOP is a single document where you list, in bullet points, how you’ll act in certain situations.

For example, mine reads:

I never ever skip my daily walk.

I stand up from my desk every hour. When someone enters my office, I’ll stand up and speak to them standing. When my phone rings, I answer it standing.

I re-read my mantras (GOP) every week during my weekly review.

Another great strategy of mine is tracking my habits. Of course, we live in a tracking culture, which is overemphasizing (and monetizing) the benefits of habit tracking. However, it can help you strengthen the habit loop.

Anyway, you have to hustle hard, never give up.

How to find time for your health habits?

Until you don’t make your health a priority, time will be your enemy.

Once you acknowledge that your health is the number one thing that makes you available to your family, you can make health a priority. When this transformation happens, time becomes abundant.

Forget about the all-or-nothing mentality. Do something every single day.

These are the words of Ted Ryce, host of the Legendary Life Podcast.

Once I learned to let go of the 60-minute gym workouts and 3-hour bike rides, something magical happened.

I realized the importance of 10 minutes throughout the day. I learned that I can work out with my family (or at least with the presence of my family and daughter). Even better, I can gamify the experience and involve my little daughter in exercising with the added benefit of raising a health-conscious kid.

We would do my 10-minute physiotherapy sessions and wall sits together, or enjoy calisthenics in the hood.

Hear me out. These moments and discoveries are truly exceptional!

Your time investment

Below, I calculated my time investment on an ordinary week with moderate performance. (No one is perfect; this is, I think, a great minimalist plan that can and should be scaled). I calculated with three office days and two remote-working days. By net time investment, I mean the solo time that you could have spent with your family or work.

You can see that my gross time investment barely exceeds a single hour on an ordinary day. It might seem a lot, but investing 4% of your day in your health and well-being, isn’t too much.

If we consider the net time investment, we get even more friendly numbers.

	Frequency	Gross Time Investment (per week)	Net Time Investment (per week)
(1) Stair climbing	3x 3x 2min	18 min	0 min (elevator time)
(2) Walking	3x 40 min	120 min	120 min
(3) Exercise snacks, VILPA	5x 3x 1 min	15 min	15 min
(4) Meditation	3x 10 min	30 min	30 min
(5) Physiotherapy/yoga/stretching	3x 10 min	30 min	0 min (if done together with your family)
(6) Zone 2 cardio	1x 90 min	90 min	90 min
(7) Strength training/calisthenics	3x 20 min	60 min	0 min (if done together with your family)
Sum	NA	363 min (~6 hours)	255 min (~4 hours)

Health habits: conclusion

The secret of habit building, I think, lies in simplicity and consistency. However common sense it sounds, doing less always wins.

The “Never miss twice” mantra works. However tiny time window you have and however tired you are, you can always find time for an exercise snack or a 10-minute walk.

If you do your 10 minutes here and 5 minutes there, you will be much ahead of 99 percent of people.

As you progress with your health habits, you’ll gain confidence in habit building and improving your life. This way, you gain momentum. Also, you’ll have a written document of all your established habits and the ones you want to implement in the future. You have a road map for your life.

Your identity slowly changes. You probably heard James Clear speaking about identity change. When you embrace a new habit, e.g. regular exercise, you change your identity from someone who is sedentary to someone who is healthy. When you exercise regularly and build up the confidence of a healthy identity, you are more likely to eat whole food as well.

This is a snowball effect. I hope you now can see that it just started snowing.

Let it snow. Let it snow. Let it snow. ❄️❄️❄️

Cover photo by Kelli McClintock on Unsplash

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